windoze virus and nix

[itld]

howdy,
this is what happened,
kiddo uses a windoze 98 box for doing his stuff, he uses NAV on his emails and it seems to carch a few nasty little things here and there.
SO when he opens his messages on my Linux RH box what happens to the viruses?
Do they just hang out and have nothing to f**k with?
are they still alive and if sent to a windoze box can they still do thier dirty deeds?
is it possible to detect windoze viruses on a nix box and blast the little bast**d before they infect somrthing else?
can they cross partitions and infect my windoze partition?

M.R. :(

[$null]

Originally posted by itld
howdy,
this is what happened,
kiddo uses a windoze 98 box for doing his stuff, he uses NAV on his emails and it seems to carch a few nasty little things here and there.
SO when he opens his messages on my Linux RH box what happens to the viruses?
Do they just hang out and have nothing to f**k with?
are they still alive and if sent to a windoze box can they still do thier dirty deeds?
is it possible to detect windoze viruses on a nix box and blast the little bast**d before they infect somrthing else?
can they cross partitions and infect my windoze partition?

M.R. :(

linux is only affected by a "special" kind of worm... one that has an exploit coded in that will grab root(see the ramen worm)... other than that linux is a 100% immune to windows viruses and even if it was ported to linux due to the multiple users and permissons the virus coud do nothing unless it was ran as root(and we never run any files from unreliable sources as root right :P)

and there are AV's for linux that will scan imcomming mail in order to prevent those nasty viruses from going to a vulnerable winders box... dont know of any of the top of my head but there are a couple :P

[Nor]

Viruses are like any other program.
They are platform dependent. But if they are ported, or can tell what OS is running then I think they can still infect the host box.
It would take one hell of a team to do that, and I've not heard of one like it.

[$null]

Originally posted by Nor
Viruses are like any other program.
They are platform dependent. But if they are ported, or can tell what OS is running then I think they can still infect the host box.
It would take one hell of a team to do that, and I've not heard of one like it.

wrong the program would have to suid to root... and that would require an exploit unless the user is a fool the code would then classify as a worm :P

[Nor]

Thx for the correction.
I'm not that knowledgeable of multi-user systems.

I was referring to what it would take to make the executable run under the target system. Not what it would take to infect the system.
One application file which ran on multiple operating systems by identifying which code to execute.

[Lynux-Penguin]

What a neat virus design is this:
have a RH7 system.
Design a virus to first suck up as much memory as possible, then execute some type of bomb to confuse the computer and there you go, infect some of CRON and daily things and u got urself a nasty one. (I designed one similar and it is EASILY possible to get to root through Memory bombs, I designed the most basic MEM bomb in the world!

for(int i=1;i > 0; i++)
printf("%d",i);

similar to this except it overloads the INODES and causes /dev/hd* to become overrun and have no other choice but to fill up swap and then you got yourself a mem overflow)